Book Image

Mastering Sass

By : Luke Watts
Book Image

Mastering Sass

By: Luke Watts

Overview of this book

CSS and Sass add elegance and excellence to the basic language, and consist of a CSS-compatible syntax that allows you to use variables, nested rules, mixins, inline imports, and much more. This book will start with an overview of the features in Sass and Compass, most of which you'll already be familiar; however, this will ensure you know what’s expected as the book goes deeper into Sass and Compass. Next you will learn CSS and HTML concepts that are vital to a good Sass workflow. After all, Sass exists to simplify writing CSS, but it won’t teach you how to make clean, scalable, reusable CSS. For that, you need to understand some basic concepts of OOCSS, SMACCS, and Atomic Design. Once you’ve brushed up on the important concepts, it’s time to write some Sass. Mainly you’ll write a few functions and mixins that really leverage control flow using @if / @else loops and you’ll learn how to figure out when and why things are going wrong before they bring you to a stop. Moving further, you’ll learn how to use @debug, @warn and @error to properly handle errors. You’ll also learn about Gulp and how to use it to automate your workflow and reduce your repetitive tasks. And finally you’ll learn about sourcemaps. With sourcemaps, you’ll be able to write, debug, and view your Sass and Compass all from within the browser. It’ll even LiveReload too! As a bonus, you’ll take a look at that funky Flexbox, currently all the rage! You’ll learn how powerful and flexible it really is, and how you can use it with Compass. Best of all, it falls back very gracefully indeed! In fact, you’ll be able to apply it to any existing project without having to change a line of the original CSS.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Mastering Sass
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

What are source maps and why should you care?


In modern web development, we use many languages on a daily basis. At the frontend especially, many of these languages aren't as terse as we would like. For example, JavaScript and CSS both have similar drawbacks. Both can have odd, non-intuitive behavior which can catch almost every developer out at some point. Both have times where new features are in limbo due to slow browser support for much-desired features. Both benefit from minification to reduce the final file size(s), and both can be a nightmare to manage as the codebase grows and as multiple developers get their idle hands on the code. For these reasons, JS/CSS transpilers and preprocessors came about.

The goals of these preprocessors are always the same:

  • Abstract away the difficult or verbose syntax in favor of terse, clean, intuitive syntax

  • Reduce common repetition in writing the language

  • Offer immediate use of new features for the underlying language, minification and easy management...